While individual energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies continue to be developed in ever-improving ways, insufficient attention is being paid to the ways in which they can be operated to maximize the benefits across a broader ‘energy system’. Significant effort, for example, is being exerted in order to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells from, for example, 15% to 18%. What is less recognized, however, is that the value of this same technology could be dramatically increased if it were coupled with an energy storage technology so that, for example, energy captured from the sun at 11 am could be discharged to meet domestic demand at 4 pm, a time at which electricity market prices may be significantly higher that they were just five hours earlier.
There are existing technologies for ‘smart building management’. In residential settings, there are systems that serve to automatically control lighting and heating, often dependent upon the time of day and month of year. Moreover, homeowners are able to override the system and/or input their own preferences. Similarly, control systems for commercial/institutional settings have long been used to improve energy performance, for example, motion detectors attached to light fixtures in stairwells and bathrooms. In industrial locations, the fact that energy can be a significant cost to some companies has meant that it is monitored closely and, therefore, industrial customers have traditionally been those first to respond to ‘demand response’ programs.
What is missing, from the state of the art, is an integrated solution that operates across energy producing and consuming devices, and also operates in consideration of external conditions.